[mudstuff]

Hi,

I've shot a few weddings in my time and I'm essentially the staff photographer where I work but this is the first time I have done a photo/video slideshow DVD outside of any wedding package or for friends/family etc.

This slideshow was for a memorial service and I scanned in 24 prints and performed colour correction, sharpening and cropping before dropping into ProShow Gold and assembling and adding transitions etc.

I then exported the slideshow as a video into Premiere and ripped some royalty free music from cd and repeated the video 10 times to match the length of the music (I couldn't just make a straight-forward loop DVD from inside ProShow as the client wanted certain music tracks so this was the easiest way for me).

I then exported MPEG-2 from Premiere, made a menu in PS and authored using Encore.

This took me about 8 hours in total over a couple of days, finishing it the day before the memorial.

I was just wondering how to price this and if anyone has any suggestions. The client is happy to pay the "going rate" though I may discount it a little.

I found a few websites offering an individual slideshow service and they generally charged per print for scanning, slideshow assembly and then for authoring and duplication and looked to cost around £100.

Is that reasonable or should I be looking for more due to the added complexity?

Any advice appreciated.

[mmace]

Originally Posted by mudstuff

This took me about 8 hours in total over a couple of days, finishing it the day before the memorial.

are you serious?
that would take me just over an hour and that's maually doing panning and zooming in proshow and including the rendering!

It took me an hour the other day to scan 250 photos, crop, colour correct and run through noiseware!

[mudstuff]

Originally Posted by mmace

are you serious?
that would take me just over an hour and that's maually doing panning and zooming in proshow and including the rendering!

It took me an hour the other day to scan 250 photos, crop, colour correct and run through noiseware!

Good for you, I think your boast is a little insensitive.

This was quite a delicate job as the prints were in various shapes, sizes, quality and condition and I individually edited each one and did some heavy restoration on some. It was not a case of scanning, cropping and some simple auto adjustments with some of the PS actions/droplets I have created for various needs.

I have access to an Epson GT-20000 with auto feeder at work which would've done the scanning quicker but these were scanned individually with the client's AIO as they didn't want the prints to leave their property so the scanning and editing took considerable time.

I spent no more than 20 minutes in ProShow, more than half the time was taken up in editing/retouching, the rest of the process was quick too.

I'd say manually retouching around 20 images in about 3-4 hours was good going anyway and these will now be preserved and available to all the family forever.

[senu]

Originally Posted by mudstuff

Good for you, I think your boast is a little insensitive.

Maybe it wasnt meant to be

This was quite a delicate job as the prints were in various shapes, sizes, quality and condition and I individually edited each one and did some heavy restoration on some. It was not a case of scanning, cropping and some simple auto adjustments with some of the PS actions/droplets I have created for various needs.

I have access to an Epson GT-20000 with auto feeder at work which would've done the scanning quicker but these were scanned individually with the client's AIO as they didn't want the prints to leave their property so the scanning and editing took considerable time.

I spent no more than 20 minutes in ProShow, more than half the time was taken up in editing/retouching, the rest of the process was quick too.

I'd say manually retouching around 20 images in about 3-4 hours was good going anyway and these will now be preserved and available to all the family forever.

This was indeed a labour intensive Job
If you had simply shot RAW use the likes of lightroom and then exported to Jpeg For Proshow Gold it would doubtless have taken less time .. maybe more than an hr though.. I always tend to do High variable bitrate 2 -pass encoding and find it takes a little while longer
mmace has an i7 machine or 2 though , but that would not do the other stuff
I would charge no less than £120 at the minimum.. at about £12-15/hr for 8 hrs work and the rest for the complexity.. Certainly a good bargaining point to get you back to £100
Those " going rates" are probably for very basic work and more complexity would attract more
HTH

[mudstuff]

Thanks senu, just the sort of response I was after. I'll suggest £100

I've just got an i7 at work with a good dedicated graphics card (an Nvidia Quad!) which I'm enjoying. I typically do most of my personal work on my laptop though which is fine for photography and DVD video but a bit slow when rendering HD content (Sony AR51SU - C2D 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Vista 64, Nvidia 8600, Bluray etc). Great for PS, iD etc and Blu on the go. Since it's so heavy, I don't notice the additional "bulk" of my Lenovo s10e either lol which comes in very handy.